75 young scientists prove their theories at Sturgeon Creek School Science Fair

Milt Guba

Sturgeon Creek Students had their annual Science Fair the past week with 75 fabulous imaginative presentations on subjects like, paper recycling, electricity, plant growth, cleaning compounds and much more.
“It is hard to make a decision on who would get awards to advance to the next stage of the event,” said teacher Darcy Jack, “there are so many excellent displays of fine quality.
Grade 8 student, Kari McLean worked on how bacteria is eliminated by cleaning products. She thinks that Fantastic will remove the most bacteria from the counters better than Antibacteria soap, regular dish soap, Javex, regular dish soap and water mix, Clorox sample wipes and Windex.
“The purpose of my project is to see what household product kills bacteria from kitchen counters the best,” she said. Through the whole experiment the temperature under the heat lamp was 79 degrees. After having the bacteria grow for four days, she found that her control group had a lot of bacteria growing on it. The growth was not totally visible looking directly from above, but when you tip the petri dish you could see a lot of bacteria growing.
The Clorox wipe sample had spots of bacteria growing all over it, it was not at all similar to the control group. Dawn, the antibacterial soap had bacteria growing all along the edges of the petri dish. Fantastic, had no visible bacteria growing on the petri dish. Windex had bacteria growing all over it, the large spots expanding along the edges. Sunlight, regular dish soap had bacteria growing all along the edges of the petri dish. Javex regular dish soap and water mix had larger spots of bacteria growing along the edge of the petri dish. Overall, Fantastic worked the best.
Grade 5 student Jared McQuaker tested different types of hearing protection that will reduce sound most effectively. “In my experiment I will test 3 different methods of hearing protection. The first was earmuffs, then earplugs and last canal caps. He made the test model with wood, a styrofoam head and a sound level meter and then tested each with 4 different sound sources. The results were recorded on spread sheets and graphs. McQuaker found that canal caps came in first place; they reduced the sound level by the average of 10 decibles. “Based on my experiment I decided the canal caps were the best.
Matt McQuaker was eager to discover whether a type of gasoline with a higher octane level will burn for a longer amount of time, or give off more emissions than on a lower octane level.
After his researching different avenues involved, he believed that a type of gasoline with a higher octane level will both burn for longer, and have less emissions than a type with a lower octane level.